A node between the physical and digital.
The rants and raves of Simon Wardley.
Industry and technology mapper, business strategist, destroyer of undeserved value. "I like ducks, they're fowl but not through choice"

There are many common patterns that impact our context (as in our landscape) and knowing this helps you anticipate change. This is the common list of patterns which we will go through in posts one by one, each one I'll add a link to the post and a short description here.

In order, they are :-

Everything evolves

Characteristics change

No one size fits all

Efficiency enables innovation

Increased stability increases agility

Higher order systems create new sources of worth

Capital flows to new areas of value

No choice over evolution

Creative destruction

Success breeds inertia

Inertia increases the more successful the past model is

Inertia kills

Not everything is random

Economy has cycles

Two different forms of disruption

Competitor's actions will change the game

Most competitors have poor situational awareness

Change is not always linear

Shifts from product to utility tend to demonstrate a punctuated equilibrium

Co-evolution

A war (point of industrialisation) causes organisations to evolve

Efficiency does not mean a reduced spend

Speed of developing higher order systems by re-combining lower order components accelerates with industrialisation of lower orders

Evolution to higher order systems results in increased energy consumption

Evolution of communication mechanisms can increase the speed of evolution

Patterns can be applied across contexts

Future differential value is inversely proportional to certainty.

... when we get to this point, I'll write a post showing how you can use these patterns to anticipate change. After which we will be in a position to talk about universal doctrine before moving onto context specific gameplay. At the very end of this (rather long) journey, we will finally be able to have reasonable discussion on culture without all the usual hand waving that accompanies that topic.

If you're feeling that this is complex, that's because competition is, despite our attempts to dress it up in 2x2s. We've twenty seven common economic patterns, sixteen different forms of doctrine and around seventy different forms of gameplay (depending upon how much stamina I have to write this all) to go through. This isn't even the exhaustive list but ultimately this will be a journey into situational awareness not trying to cover up the complexity as simple.

I know this stuff off by heart, I live it and I use it at both national and international levels but then I've been doing this for a decade. It's always amazing to experience how much you can do to manipulate a market. I want to try and expose that to you all but we need to start somewhere, so climate it is.